Thunder rumbled. The whole world felt strange, the air choked and thick with damp.
Marak rubbed his ears, rubbed his eyes, decided he could sit up, and did. Hati set her hand on his arm.
He moved that arm, embraced her shoulder, drew her close. They sat that way a while, one leaning on the other. Norit slept with Lelie across her lap.
He felt exhausted, drained of all the strength he had ever had.
Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. Luz said. Or whatever it was that droned on that way. The world had reached a sort of exhausted peace. He saw Norit wake, and he put out a hand and caressed Norit’s knee without resistance. Norit set her hand on his, looked at him, for the most part sane.
They rested that way until the light crept back, slowly, sullenly.
He decided finally that it was morning enough, and that today he would get on his feet and get into the saddle again.
It took two tries to get on his feet. Hati braced herself and pulled and he made it up, and walked, and passed the tent flap to the outside, into what passed for a dawn.
The air was cold, bitter cold. The sand was wet. He wrapped his coat about him, and saw others stirring out of their tents. He walked past the edge of the tent and looked around the camp, all around, seeing tents as far as he could see. After the wind that had blown over them, after seeing the scoured bone that had landed at the edge of the Ila’s tent, he had feared far worse was the case. Beshti, some of them, bore cuts and gashes. Some were burned over part of their skin, the hair simply gone. They were a sad-looking lot, and some might have died.
Tofi came out of the tent. Patya did. “You’re all right,” Patya said.
“Well enough,” Marak said, and heard the voices to distraction: Luz was nagging him. Luz wanted something that did not involve the east, rather north. North. Not far.
He looked, saw the Ila’s tent, and walked that way without a word to anyone. Hati and Norit went with him, perhaps under the same instruction, hearing the same voice. The au’it was not with them. He had no idea whether the au’it still attended them. Or whether the Ila, on second thought, neededan au’it with them any longer.
They went into the Ila’s tent, and inside, Memnanan was there, just putting on his belt. With him in crowded circumstances, in the tent foyer, were three of his men, an au’it, and two tribesmen, one Haga, one Keran—neither Aigyan nor Menditak, it seemed, had left anything to chance, or to the Ila’s goodwill. They had slept there, and had just begun to prepare for the day.
“Marak Tain,” Memnanan said, looking at him as a man might look at the risen dead.
“Alive,” Marak said. And added: “Grateful.”
Memnanan nodded slightly, acknowledgment.
Hati said darkly. “My husband saved the Ila’s life. But I doubt she’s grateful. She’s awake. I think we need to see her.”
Memnanan indicated the way, the curtain. “My men take my orders. The priests… have come here. They’ve been about. I haven’t let them in—waiting yourorders, omi.”
The priests: a reservoir of the Ila’s own makers, a source, like a well, of her former independence.
But there was, he suspected, no renewal there: if they were overcome in her. Luz’s would win, every time, now, and every priest who took in the Ila’s makers would now take in Luz’s. That was the truth his own body told him. That was the answer the world had, from now on.
He pushed the curtain back. The Ila’s servants, rising up to bar the way, saw him and hesitated. He simply walked through with Hati and Norit, in Memnanan’s witness, and the tribesmen’s, and flung back the last curtain.
The Ila, aware of them as they were of her, sat in her chair, waiting for them. Au’it attended her. Her white skin, the red robes—those were the same. But bones stood out in her hands as they did in his. They both had given up substance to the struggle.
Hati and Norit stopped one on a side of him. They were alike now, all together, all part of a set.
The Ila moved her hand, and the au’it settled on the mats on either side of her and opened their books.
“You’ve had your way,” the Ila said. “You think you’ve won.”
“ Luzhas won,” Marak said, but he was unwilling, himself, to concede that without limits. He added, for himself: “So far.”
“So far.” The Ila’s voice was weak, but edged. “I gave you your freedom. I gave everyone in the world their freedom, such as we had, so long as it lasted. Now there’s one way, one blood, and one tribe in the world, and we’vejoined it.” She drew breath, and her eyes held the old fire. “So let the ondatworry about that.”
“So you have secrets,” Norit said. “You change your makers at will. You’re trying to change them now, but so far, it’s not working, is it? We’ll understand how you do that. Sooner or later, we’llknow.”
“Luz.”
“Yes?” the answer came.
The Ila smiled… smiled with chilling serenity. “We’ll see. Granted we have an immediate problem… still, we’ll talk.”
“We arepragmatists,” Luz said from Norit’s lips. “You can’t feed this mass of people, or shelter them. We can. You think you can change my makers, given a hundred years, or two hundred, or three. Try.”
“’I assure you, I’ll try.”
“We should go,” Marak said to his wives, and took them each by an arm and walked.
He had seen enough to satisfy himself the Ila was alive and that she had become one of the mad. But she was not content to be that—she never would be content. She meant to change the order of the world, and now meant to do it from inside their ranks.
Luz then would change it back, and so it would go, by degrees as tiny as the makers themselves. Now there were two gods on the earth, and neither one was, or would be, perhaps for all time to come, completely in power over the other.
There might be gods in the heavens, too, the ondat, watching to see how it all came out: he believed his vision of the tower in the stars.
But the ondatcould scarcely observe a war of makers, carried on in the veins of two determined women.
Himself, he had done with gods, and had no desire to contend with makers. He put an arm about his wives, one on either hand, and went out through the curtain, taking one combatant out of speaking range, at least for now. It might be a while before the Ila heard the voices he heard, if she ever did.
He gave Memnanan a passing courtesy, and went out into the morning. An au’it followed them, and took up her duty.
They packed up and they rode, a long, weary line of riders.
They went in a kind of twilight, the air cold, the sun thickly shrouded in slate gray cloud.
But the light was enough, finally, to show them a strange, up-thrust shape on the horizon.
It was the tower on its hill, on the rim of the land they, could see.
“We’re almost there,” Marak said, and pointed it out to his wives, who already knew.
Chapter Twenty-Six
« ^
Another year is gone, as much as that means.
—Marak’s Book
The air was cold and clear, breath of man and beast frosting on the wind… it was noon, though anyone who remembered the sky as it had been would never know it. Snow had fallen in the morning, and lay all about… more boded in the west, out of which all weather came, but Marak Trin had seen the stars scream down from the heavens. That was hazard. He had seen the deep snows. That was hardship. This little spit of snow failed to daunt him.